Two US women journalists went on trial in North Korea Thursday on charges that could send them to a labour camp for years and further raise tensions with Washington following last week's nuclear test.

TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee were detained by North Korean border guards on March 17 while researching a story about refugees fleeing the hardline communist state.

Pyongyang previously said they would face trial for "hostile acts" and illegally entering the country.

The Korean Central News Agency said earlier Thursday the trial would start at 3 pm (0600 GMT) "on the basis of the indictment already brought against them."

Its one-sentence report gave no further details and there was no update on the progress of the hearing.

South Korean analysts say "hostile acts" are punishable by a minimum five years' detention and hard labour.

The case comes amid growing international tensions sparked by the North's nuclear test and its apparent plans to launch another long-range missile.

Analysts have said Pyongyang may use the pair as a bargaining chip to open direct negotiations with Washington.

Supporters of the pair and a media freedom group called for leniency.

Reporters Without Borders said that even if they made a mistake by getting too close to the North Korean border, "they did so solely for journalistic purposes and not for political reasons or for the purposes of espionage."

Friends, family and colleagues of Lee and Ling held candlelight vigils in Washington and seven other US cities Wednesday evening.

"I wish this were all a bad dream," Ling's sister Lisa Ling said in a letter read out at the rally in Washington.

The rally also received a letter of support from Roxana Saberi, the US journalist of partly Iranian origin who was freed by Tehran after being convicted of spying for the United States.

Saberi said she understood what Ling and Lee were going through.

The families of the pair Monday appealed for clemency and urged the two governments not to link the case to the nuclear standoff.

The reporters, who work for California-based Current TV co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, were allowed to phone their families in the US a week ago.

"We had not heard their voices in over two and a half months," said Lisa Ling. "They are very scared — they're very, very scared.

"Now is the time to try and urge both governments to communicate," she said.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the charges against the pair are "baseless."

Both detainees are married and Lee has a four-year-old daughter.

The North has been showing an increasingly defiant face to the world since it fired a long-range rocket on April 5 despite international appeals to refrain.

After the United Nations Security Council punished the launch by tightening sanctions, the North responded on May 25 with its second nuclear test.

It has also renounced the armistice on the Korean peninsula and is said to be preparing to test medium-range missiles and a long-range Taepodong-2.

The North is also holding a South Korean employee of the Kaesong joint industrial estate just north of the inter-Korean border.

The man has been detained since March 30 for allegedly criticising Pyongyang's political system and encouraging a woman worker to defect. Seoul officials have been given no access to him.

Pyongyang has in the past freed captured Americans but only after personal interventions.

In 1996, then-US congressman Bill Richardson negotiated the release of Evan Hunziker, who had been detained for three months on suspicion of spying after swimming the Yalu border river.

Richardson in 1994 helped negotiate the release of a US military helicopter pilot shot down after straying into North Korea.

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